Free Doosra by Vish Dhamija Page B

on a search. This would all be undercover, of course. When — and not if — the guy was spotted, the orders were clear: just report his whereabouts, do not make any contact. Exhausted from making those calls personally, the two senior inspectors split for the day.
    ***
    Teams were briefed and dispatched to Jogani fortress before Rita arrived in the office the next morning. Jatin turned out to be even more efficient than before. Essentially, all the three subordinates in her team — Rita had got Rajesh Nene signed off for the case — were competent. Good sign that no one consciously or inadvertently throttled the progress out of competitive jealousy or idiocy. Rita had been up late the night before, searching for archived news from the METROTIME.BE portal: news items available in Flemish or French, which Google Chrome effortlessly translated into English for her. She found nothing on the web that wasn't mentioned in Victor's report. Perhaps the dailies in Belgium didn't do much digging themselves and relied on whatever info the police provided them with to report or else the case wasn't significant enough to deploy their resources on a random, one-off murder in the city — a foreigner chilled during a heist wasn't exactly WW3.
    Rita wanted to bond with the guys, rebuild the sodality with them after the brief break. She gave a shout and the three men were happy to join her for lunch. The foursome walked out to a nearby pav-bhaji, nothing fancy. Jatin left for Jogani's swanky residence after lunch.
    ***
    Back in the Operations Room, Rita updated Vikram and Rajesh Nene on the interesting meeting Jatin and she had had with Anita, and that troops had now been dispatched to scour anything they could get their hands on after a significant gap of time, and numerous people that might have handled any possible evidence. In any event, a break in the chain of evidence would not be acceptable in a court. In short, counting on anything received from that search would be amateur. They should be content if they got some pointer. The two senior inspectors filled her in on the contacts they had made with several individuals. If Sishir Singh looked anything like the guy in the picture they had he should be identified soon.
    Like a kid who had just seen Santa Claus, Jatin returned in a state of excitement. His exuberance was powered by the fact that the date logs on Jogani's computer had established that it hadn't been used after the evening he had flown out of India. And thus, he sounded confident that anything and everything that Jogani had worked on — emails, accounts, bank details, and airline and hotel bookings — could be traced even though the cache had cleared after thirty days as per Jogani's computer settings. He told Rita that most computer users didn't realise that deleted history from hard drive could be retrieved in three steps even by some dubious expert: search for it, copy the .DAT file, and using a specialised reader the entire web history would be revealed unless, of course, some expensive software had been installed to break the deleted files.
    But why would Jogani have bought something like that?
    Nothing significant was discovered in the interviews of the Jogani household staff conducted so far. They were still in progress, but Rita didn't have much confidence of achieving something that might break the case. Even under ordinary circumstances, Rita knew that very few witnesses could narrate anything consequential after a critical event. It's not that people intend to lie, but they falter, and the more serious the crime the more the duress and anxiety, and anxiety was a known bitch. It frequently lapsed memory. History is packed with victims who'd seen their own attackers close and personal but the trauma dwarfed their memory; where people failed to identify the perpetrator correctly, remembering the events or their sequence was a big ask. Police largely worked through the inconsistencies in witness statements; if they